19 Responses to this entry

Well I would say thanks for more proof theres no time left for futuristic larps.

But since this blog is in favor of multiethnicalism and authoritariansm I have to ask whats the problem? you cant have low brow WNs offending the immigrants that make life so stimulating and vibrant.It almost sounds like your a Jeffersonian

so here another example of what actual warfare looks like, some 4chan neckbeards triangulated contrails and matched them to air traffic control data to capture the blue flag. Silly 4g game, A little imagination would gleam the implication of how sky net could be destroyed if reactionaries had balls- and yeah i know werent committed to the non agression directive of ZOG uh moldbug

Curious how you view the relationship between this tweet and disintermediation?

To a first approximation – as an enterprise becomes disintermediated, it seems natural that it begins to lose its dominant “meaning making” position. This naturally leads to a circling of the wagons in a (usually impotent) attempt to postpone the erosion of their position.

Wondering if there has been any systematic investigation of the signs and symptoms of disintermediation. A quick Google search doesn’t reveal much.

Like all of those libertarian things, they make sense until you’re in power, then, not so much. Granted, the time varies from onset of power to realization that libertarian ideas are bunkum. Or, put another way, when you get power, destroying freedom of speech is a very precise and correct application of the central concept of libertarianism: muh freedom.

“For the powerless, freedom is freedom from power; for the powerful, it is the opposite. Since the powerless have no means to effect this, the conclusion of the matter is evident to all.”

Libertarianism as your whole world-view though is idiotic. I find it is often atheistic; — and attractive to pseudo-intellectuals or hedonistic care for nothings.

But it’s far from its ideas in toto being bogus.

Its scriptual body has certain uses. We don’t want Oriental Despotism, do we?

As we know states exist on a spectrum of liberalty or libertism (libertarianism even), it’s not an either-or state of 1984 or Libertopia.

Spartans e.g. enjoyed certain liberties that other citizens did not.

The question is, always, liberty in what?

Would you oppose Christian libertarians? Certainly there is a certain statism in a healthy family. Nobody is an absolute anarch, though some rate high. Even autonomy and autocracy are spectrums. Who will attain the peak?

» People starved because the ruler taxed too heavily.
People are difficult to be ruled,
Because the ruler governs with personal desire [tyrannous ambition] and establishes too many laws to confuse the people.
Therefore the people are difficult to be ruled.
People take death lightly,
Because the ruler pursues after luxurious life and depletes the people.
Therefore the people take death lightly.
One who does not value his life with [narcissistic] self-desire, truly cherishes his life. »

{Book of the Tao, 4th century BC]

Don’t tell me supposed “reactionaries” haven’t often done fucked up. But I don’t think libertarianism is necessarily synonymous with individualism, altho the latter is a type of the former.

Let’s not either conflate it with anarchism, which desires to do away with the “state”.

Minarchism is e.g. a type of libertarianism that does not promote a stateless zone but a minimal state.

Ancient and Medieval states were often quite minimal as states or bureaucracies compared to modern ones.

White upright man has always been quite libertarian in a sense, as its body of law and history shows. You’d want to guarantee some autonomy for families and businesses, lest it be Communism. It’s one thing to larp as feudal lords on the Internet, another thing to be propertied.

» It was.
It became a value.
The value became a concept.
The concept became a political slogan.
The political slogan became an ideal.
The ideal became individual, collective and universal.
The universal ideal became law.
The collectivist ideal became a social motto.
The individual ideal became a belief.
As law, as a social motto, and as a belief, it developed into a revolutionary weapon.
Croce characterised it as a ” religion “.
J. Evola called it a ” fetishism “.

It is no longer more than a word, neurotically parroted by the masses and cantillated on all the media 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Its pathological character cannot be doubted.

What J. Evola points out in the introduction to his ‘Il Mito del Sangue’ about race in antiquity can also apply to freedom at that time : ” — in aristocratic traditions [racism was not theorised as much as experienced, lived, normal]. As a result, it is very rare to find the term ‘race’ in the ancient world : the Ancients did not need to speak of race in the modern sense, since they had race, so to say. ”

This absolutely fundamental fact has been well discerned by K. A. Raaflaub in his examination of the scarce occurrence of the term `freedom’ in archaic Greek literature : ” the free — or, more precisely, the noble elite… – did not ordinarily regard their freedom as a fact worth noting. Freedom was thus either unimportant or taken for granted. ” In this context, it is normal that ” members of Homeric society seem to have thought and talked of freedom only when they perceived a threat to their own freedom, which they had hitherto taken for granted. ” The two explanations offered to account for this fact demonstrate a deep understanding of ancient Aryan-derived traditional cultures : ” first, generally, the status difference between free and unfree may have meant less in Homeric society than it did later because other social distinctions and criteria were more important and contributed to minimizing that difference. Second, in particular, the scant attention paid to freedom reflects and is based upon specific traits of the elite. Their social organization and relationships, norms and values, ways of thinking, and relations to the community apparently afforded no means by which freedom could attain a high value. ” ‘Freedom’ did not play any part in the political life and institutions of the early Hellenes either. ” Freedom of speech was no formalized right ; it was simply taken for granted by those who enjoyed it. Freeman status was not recognized as a criterion to determine ‘rights,’ such as participation in assembly or debate ; and the freedom of individuals or the community was no issue of public discussion. ”

The community was homogenous and organic, and its homogeneity and its organicity were due, as insightfully explained by J. Evola, to the regular and closed hereditary transmission of a force that as a magnet established contacts, created a psychic atmosphere [see e.g. Max Weber on charisma], stabilised the social structure and determined a system of coordination and gravitation between the individual elements and the centre in view of the regular development on the part of single individuals of prenatal determinations on the plane of human existence. [ “One of the most important decisions that DeLanda makes is to incorporate Max Weber’s typology of authority structure. According to Weber there are three types of authority-structures: rational-legal, traditional, and charismatic. To accommodate Weber’s three authority-structures, DeLanda regards them as extreme forms (or ideal types) that are in a continuum. The result is that organisations and populations will usually have a composition of all the authority types. It is now worth outlining the characteristics of each extreme form.”] It was a racial [or cross-tribal] community [of clans, and orders] … and this explains why, even though full awareness of individual freedom and of its value may have existed from early times, it did not, and could not, transcend individual feelings to the point of leading the ‘polis’ to value highly ‘freedom’ and to conceptualise it. Even better, it was one of the ” deep-seated condition in the aristocratic way of life which prevented freedom, in whatever context, from being brought to general attention and entering the political arena as a programmatic rallying cry in its own right. ” There was a higher concern, which was the ‘autonomia’ of the ‘oikos’ and of the ‘polis’.

The fact that the nobles took freedom for granted can account for the fact that no positive definition of freedom (‘eleutheria’) is found in the early Greek literature, and that ” From its earliest appearance ‘eleutheros’ forms a pair of opposites with doulos. In Homer donlion emar and eleutheron emar illuminate the same event from two sides. Both expressions are used only when attention is focused on the fact and moment of the loss of freedom — lack of freedom is determined on the one hand by subjugation to force and a foreign will — in other words, by restricted freedom of action — and on the other by loss of protection, home, and country, ” so that it seems reasonable to assume that the Homeric idea of ‘being free’ must at the very least include control over one’s own person and actions and the security of living in an intact, stable community. The adjective ‘eleutheros’ is ” primarily used in a single fixed formula referring to the moment when freedom is lost ; that is, it refers not directly to a person but to a change in the condition of that person. Eleutheros in Homer never designates the status of individuals or a group among the free or dominant part of society in contrast to those who are unfree or dependent. Thought of the community is prompted by only one phrase containing eleutheros. ”

So we have to understand exactly what caused ‘freedom’ to become a highly praised value, both in the political and in the social sphere. Various consistent assumptions can be put forward : ” The customs of war might change so that armed conflicts resulted no longer in the destruction of cities but in their subjugation, and in the enslavement not just of women and children but of men as well. As a result, male slaves would become less exceptional, and with increasing frequency, slavery might change its character, prompting a change in awareness among the free as well. Moreover, free farmers might come to depend on the nobility not merely for the arbitration of conflicts but also economically, which might lead to exploitation and new forms of dependence. Consequently, the loss of freedom would no longer be blamed only on intangibles — war, piracy, or god-sent fate — but on individuals, members of the same community, who were known and could therefore be criticized or attacked. All this might happen not simply in isolated cases but in increasing frequency and according to recognizable patterns. Then again, the aristocratic value system might be questioned and elite power challenged ; in the aristocratic self-perception, new alternatives to status based on predominance might emerge— Finally, the relationship within the community between the private and public spheres might shift ; the latter might become more intense and be structured by regulated institutions, procedures, and laws ; new forms of accruing power might emerge, new identities become possible or be demanded, and the principles previously determining the individual’s ability to participate in government lose their validity. ” Solonian Athens illustrates to a limited extent the possibility of such developments, which, however, could hardly have occurred without a drop in the aforementioned force, as a result of the interbreeding of some Hellenes castigated by Menexenus. »
[‘Evola as he is’, August 1, 2012]

▬» If we now assume that although the modern and medieval systems are anarchical yet profoundly different in their forms of anarchy—in the very actors who were qualified to participate in ‘‘foreign affairs’’ and in their geopolitical rationalities—we cannot simply deduce such differences from the self-same condition of anarchy. Our task is to synthesize the fragmented findings of IR scholars in a coherent theoretical framework by understanding the constitutive nexus between the medieval form of conditional property (structure) and the dominant form of lordly rationality (agency). »

B. Teschke, »Geopolitical Relations in the European Middle Ages: History and Theory», 1998.

▬» Having made the argument for the “primacy of the political” when discussing the making of polities, I also argue in the book for “the primacy of the religious” when it comes to explaining the actions of the Church. The Church during this era was not motivated primarily by power-political considerations or by the logic or social property relations; rather, it was motivated by a particular set of religious self-representations and an entailed set of core values and interests. While other motives intersected with and inflected these core values and interests, they were decidedly secondary in nature. The principal condition-of-possibility for the religious wars of late-medieval Latin Christendom was the religious identity-interest complex of a religious institution and the structural antagonisms this complex generated with other actors within and beyond the Latin Christian world order. Similarly, while kings, princes and lords may to some degree have had more mundane interests related to the pursuit of wealth, their primary motives in “taking the cross” were religious in nature. The “language” of religion – in the sense intended by Quentin Skinner when he coined the phrase “the language of politics” – used to explain and justify crusading on the part of temporal actors was neither a smokescreen for “deeper” motives (political or socioeconomic) nor some sort of false consciousness. Instead, it was both a Skinnerian “discourse of legitimacy” that constrained actors and a Wendtian core identity that motivated them. »

A. Latham, »Medieval Geopolitics, interview», 2013.

▬» But Athens was never a pure majoritarian system. Of course its major deviation from majoritarianism was to its discredit: women, slaves, and resident aliens were excluded from the franchise, leaving a self-interested minority in charge. But another of its deviations from majoritarianism was much more laudable: Athenian courts had the power of judicial review. First, it was possible to prosecute a member of the Assembly for introducing an unconstitutional proposal. If the prosecution won, then the proposal, if it had been passed into law, was automatically repealed. In addition, there were nomothetic (legislative) courts in which a law could be prosecuted; arguments were made in prosecution and in defense, and if the jurors found for the prosecution, the law was, again, repealed. »

RT Long, »Ancient Greece’s Legacy for Liberty», 2015.

In its model-setting aristocratic phase, ancient Greece was strictly religious and autonomist.

Incidentally, » Confronting enduring historiographical assumptions that hold that the East India Company’s policies and attitudes were hostile or ambivalent towards religion, this chapter argues that religion was in fact central to the Company’s constitution and political thought in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. While emphasizing the importance of toleration as a key principle of political economy, essential for cultivating populous and commercially vibrant settlements, Company leaders exhibited a serious commitment to protecting and preserving Protestantism in Asia. Its leaders wrote in the languages of religion, apparently deeply invested in the notion of Providence and the role of God in shaping its establishment abroad. They also understood, like many in the early modern world, that supervision over religion was a critical aspect of sovereignty and a fundamental duty of government. Company policy established and governed standards for religious worship and moral behavior, in another attempt to cultivate virtuous and obedient settlers. It also sought to curb the influence of Catholicism and Islam in its settlements, and promoted the establishment of chaplaincies, churches, and even a form of proselytizing especially amongst those non-Protestant settlers in its colonies. »

PJ Stern, »The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India», 2011.

I’m just saying that the original tweet is incoherent and dishonest. When I answer a survey question about inviting speakers, I am absolutely not answering a survey question about protesting speakers or passing laws. The vast majority of academics probably answer surveys accurately and pedantically: they are not even aware of the 5-d meme-chess signalling that you guys obsess over.

▬» In recent years a debate has developed over the role of republicanism in the American Revolution and in the British radicalism of the 18th century. For many decades the consensus was that liberalism, especially that of John Locke, was paramount and that republicanism had a distinctly secondary role.
The new interpretations were pioneered by J.G.A. Pocock, who argued in The Machiavellian Moment (1975) that, at least in the early 18th century, republican ideas were just as important as liberal ones. Pocock’s view is now widely accepted. Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood pioneered the argument that the American founding fathers were more influenced by republicanism than they were by liberalism. Cornell University professor Isaac Kramnick, on the other hand, argues that Americans have always been highly individualistic and therefore Lockean.
In the decades before the American Revolution (1776), the intellectual and political leaders of the colonies studied history intently, looking for models of good government. They especially followed the development of republican ideas in England. Pocock explained the intellectual sources in America:
The Whig canon and the neo-Harringtonians, John Milton, James Harrington and Sidney, Trenchard, Gordon and Bolingbroke, together with the Greek, Roman, and Renaissance masters of the tradition as far as Montesquieu, formed the authoritative literature of this culture; and its values and concepts were those with which we have grown familiar: a civic and patriot ideal in which the personality was founded in property, perfected in citizenship but perpetually threatened by corruption; government figuring paradoxically as the principal source of corruption and operating through such means as patronage, faction, standing armies (opposed to the ideal of the militia), established churches (opposed to the Puritan and deist modes of American religion) and the promotion of a monied interest – though the formulation of this last concept was somewhat hindered by the keen desire for readily available paper credit common in colonies of settlement. A neoclassical politics provided both the ethos of the elites and the rhetoric of the upwardly mobile, and accounts for the singular cultural and intellectual homogeneity of the Founding Fathers and their generation. »

▬» Rome was both a city and an empire built on the values of a city, thus unlike anything in the American experience. Yet Americans in the new republic identified with Rome in a number of significant ways.

They identified even with Rome’s geography. In Washington, DC, Capitol Hill (formerly called Jenkins Hill) alludes to one of the Seven Hills of Rome.

– John Dickinson (conservative, headed up Articles of Confederation): Fabius in Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania

The Founders’ political ideas were largely informed by Roman republican and imperial ideas. They sought to create a mixed constitution that balanced monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. (This is why our nation is not technically a democracy.)

The political vocabulary they used — republic, virtue, president, capitol, constitution, Senate — was based on Latin words. The legislative processes they utilized — veto, sine die — were Latin. Many of their political symbols — the eagle, the fasces, the image of a leader on a coin — were Roman in inspiration.

The architecture of the American Founding also showed a predilection for the Roman aesthetic sense. It’s not too much of a stretch to assert that the buildings and monuments lining the National Mall in Washington, DC — with its stately, classical architecture — might resemble a Roman colony; the new additions constructed in the 1930s continued the Roman theme. The Capitol was inspired by Renaissance models that, in turn, were loosely based on the Roman Pantheon. Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, looks like a Roman temple. The Founders’ sculpture and painting were also inspired by Roman precedents. It is not unusual to see George Washington adorned in a toga.

The Founders were fascinated by the fall of the Western Empire and took the lessons from that fall and applied those lessons to the American cause. They were especially concerned that luxury would lead to the undoing of republican virtue.

Moreover, the Romans went through a dramatic passage from a somewhat “foreign” monarchy (the Etruscans) to the republic — just as Americans did at our Founding, when we separated from an increasingly foreign and tyrannical British monarchy. (The Georges, recall, were Hanoverians.)

The Founders had ideas of what a good empire could be — e.g., Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty — that borrowed from the universal ideals of the Roman Empire. But our Founders also warned that empires can injure freedom if there are few checks and balances. The dictatorial or absolute rulers who emerged during the Roman civil wars and Roman Empire provided antimodels, examples of the Hell we should never descend into.

Many Southern aristocrats identified with the ancient Romans because of the institution of slavery. Many Northern yankees feared that slavery hurt the development of a middle-class economy, so they took away another lesson from ancient Rome.

Bread and circuses — today’s bridge cards and ESPN — may also be relevant to our experience as Americans, as they tend to keep civil unrest to a minimum because unemployed and underemployed people are fed and entertained and even have a vicarious outlet for frustration, anger, and violence.

The Roman Eras

Each of the major eras of Roman history was instructive to the Americans of the founding period, well read as they were in the classics.

1. The transition from Etruscan kings to the Republic via an outrage — a rape — leads to the emergence of the model republican, Publius.

2. The Republic was destroyed by imperial expansion, even if it was the unintended consequence of security concerns. The Mediterranean narrows significantly between Rome and Carthage, meaning that these two ancient republics would fight to the death for control of transportation and commerce. But long and numerous wars can destroy republics. Republics tend to turn into empires when they have to fight and expand to secure ever bigger defensive and commercial corridors. So the three Punic wars against Carthage slowly turned Rome into an empire.

3. Victories abroad led to unforeseen changes at home, economically, socially, and politically. Slaves imported as the spoils of war drastically altered the economy of the agrarian republic. They undercut the prices of the commodities produced by yeomen farmers. Unable to earn a living off the land, many yeomen farmers migrated to Rome, looking for work. The subsequent unrest led to a century of civil war, culminating in the tyrant Julius Caesar.

The unemployed masses that were driven off the land and into Rome needed food and diversions, so the emperors provided bread and circuses — our bridge cards and ESPN?

4. Out of the civil wars came strong, able rulers like Caesar Augustus and other emperors who established order and the Pax romana. Augustus kept republican forms while adopting imperial powers.

Through its transportation network, military might, and imperial leadership, the Roman Empire achieved what no nation before or since has: It unified Europe south of the Danube and west of the Rhine. Europe has pursued the dream of unification ever since the Pax romana. The pursuit of this dream explains much of the tragedy and triumph of the European experience.

In Roman times, it was as though Alexander the Great’s dream of a united world were finally realized by the caesars: It was politically Roman, but culturally Hellenistic.

5. In its religious history, the Roman Empire went from polytheism to monolatry to monotheism — the opposite, by the way, of what America’s 13 colonies and states went through.

Christianity began on the Palestine frontier — away from the intellectual elite and beautiful people of the day — yet prevailed at the right historic moment, combining three key ingredients that would help it become the established religion of the West: (1) Jewish spiritual yearning and moral rigor; (2) Greek ideas and writing; and (3) Roman imperial transportation, communication, and security.

6. The Western Empire “fell” in 476 A.D. The causes of the “fall” were probably many, thus providing numerous paradigms and warnings for all peoples in all ages to come. The Eastern Empire centered at Constantinople did not fall for another 1,000 years.

The “fall” of the Western Empire was not really a “fall.” Germanic tribes were coopted to defend otherwise indefensible territory. But 476 would be an epochal event nonetheless. The dissolution of imperial authority in the West created opportunities for Germans to acculturate and achieve an unexpected synthesis that would be foundational for later Western civilization. The synthesis was:
– Judeo-Christian in its moral and spiritual foundation;
– Greco-Roman in its philosophical and legal foundation;
– Germanic in its spirit of freedom in the northern woods, having elective monarchies, assemblies of freemen, and sacred property rights. (The Anglo-Saxon expression of the Germanic spirit would blossom in England, and thus be transmitted to America through the supremacy of its representative institution, Parliament, and the Common Law.)

This tripartite synthesis — Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, and Germanic — informed the civilization called Christendom. By the 15th century it would begin to put its mark on the entire world.

Coda

In significant ways, Rome never fell. It certainly never fell in the imagination. Politically Europeans long tried to achieve the “second Rome” and the “third Rome.” (Mussolini and Hitler both vied for the distinction.) Artistically, the Roman aesthetic continued to inform Western sensibilities.

Americans’ fascination with ancient Rome did not end during the founding or the early days of the new republic. It continued in the schools where Latin was taught. It was expressed after the Second World War in the many “swords and sandals” movies set in ancient Rome. It is even apparent in the Star Wars movies that feature the good republic/bad empire dichotomy. Rome is very much alive in our imaginations today.

______________________

Notes and sources:

* The term, “Errand into the Wilderness,” was made famous by the great historian of the Puritans, Perry Miller, who used it as the title of one of his books. Miller borrowed the title, in turn, from a 1670 jeremiad delivered from a Massachusetts pulpit on the eve of an election. Like so many Puritan sermons, it warned sinful and unregenerate people of an angry God who had the capacity to destroy. »

» Thousands of men of Jewish descent and hundreds of what the Nazis called ‘full Jews’ served in the German military with Adolf Hitler’s knowledge and approval.

Cambridge University researcher Bryan Rigg has traced the Jewish ancestry of more than 1,200 of Hitler’s soldiers, including two field marshals and fifteen generals (two full generals, eight lieutenant generals, five major generals), ” men commanding up to 100,000 troops. ” »

Just stumbled upon this.

B.t.w. doesn’t that the “Gestapo” allowed Freud to leave Austria as late as 1938, tell us that the Nazis weren’t trying to kill all Jews as the holocaust muhthos often claims?

From what I have read they didnt intend to kill the jews at all but the logistics of deporting them coupled with no else wanting them forced them to rethink. Arendt on Eichman i think recalls he was originally to partner with the zionists to lead the jews out of germany. Your discovery seems quite possible once they actually began to expel jews they realized it was not so easy to determine who was a jew what to do with mixed marriages and strategic jews it became a mess.On the other hand the subjects so fraught you never know what propaganda